Steve Albrecht, The Library Leader’s Guide to Human Resources

Steve Thomas: Steve Albrecht, welcome back to Circulating Ideas.

Steve Albrecht: Thanks Steve. Good to be with you again.

Steve Thomas: The previous books that you’ve written and that you were on the podcast to talk about were focused on library security issues. What made you pivot to writing a book now on human resources?

Steve Albrecht: So I’ve always been an HR guy, and the reason for that is I started in my security work and workplace violence prevention. So back in 94, I co-wrote the first business book on workplace violence. And when that book came out, really it was a post office issue and it was pre-Columbine so there was a mindset around workplace violence as being not an issue that it is today, certainly with the school shootings and all the other stuff we see.

So the evolution from workplace violence to a threat assessment, which is high risk situations involving employees who make threats, and then that trickled down to can you just talk to some of these employees that are having behavior problems? Can you talk to ’em about attendance and conflict with other people? Then that trickled down to, can you just talk to employees about coaching skills, growing in their job or promotions or mentorship, get moving to the next level. And I said, sure. So over the 30 years that I’ve been involved, there’s a movement towards talking to employees about their career development and things like that.

So in order to get that level of skill, when I got out of graduate school, I went back to a group called SHRM, Society for Human Resource Management. They’re the biggest HR entity on the planet. They probably have half a million members. They have a couple certifications, which I have one called PHR, Professional and Human Resources. That certification is a lot of stuff about a lot of things in HR, benefits, hiring, supervision, that type of stuff. So I’ve always worked in that arena as a side of the security stuff, the workplace violence stuff. Because not everything in life is dangerous or scary like that workplace violence stuff.

It’s a great question because I try to tell my clients sometimes, “Hey, I’m not just a security guy. Let’s talk about operations and let’s talk about hiring. Let’s talk about bringing in the best candidates into the library that you can and keeping them there, retention and things like that.” So that’s really the evolution into this. It’s the same as, people say, “Can you talk about customer service?” and the answer is, yeah, I wrote a book about it and I’ve been doing customer service training for front counter, over the phone, face-to-face, out in the field, people my entire career, so kind of a split personality.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s almost like an extension of workplace conflict. It doesn’t have to be involving punching and knives and guns and everything. It can just be, “You took my sandwich from the break room fridge!” and how do you manage all that kind of stuff.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. And also the thing for me in working with libraries for these 25 years is that sometimes, and you’ve seen this in your career, there are people that have to be the jack of all trades. So they come in, they’re the library director and the HR director. They’re also the facilities director, the IT director, the chief cook and bottle washer.

So I wrote the Library Leader’s Guide to HR to say, where are you in your career in terms of the HR process? Maybe you have an HR department, maybe you have an HR manager, maybe there’s somebody who’s a director. Oftentimes as you see in libraries that are city and county oriented, somebody in the city or the county is the HR director, and you funnel everything that’s HR related through them. But I work with a lot of libraries that are quite small and even districts, like I have clients in Kansas and so the Kansas Library District is one person and they do everything. They hire and screen and interview and hire and discipline and all the other stuff that’s oriented around that. So I tried to write the book in such a way where you could be at any stage in your HR career and pick up something from it.

Steve Thomas: As a leader, as you move up the organization, you gotta be thinking about stuff like that more often.

Steve Albrecht: One of the things I said in the book was establish a relationship with the attorneys around you. It could be Library Board, it could be the city or county where you have a city attorney or a county counsel or something like that where you can use them as a resource because you don’t know all the stuff that they know about, like, for example, protected classes. Protected classes used to be age, race, gender, sexual orientation. Now it’s 15 other things. There’s lots of things now where they’ve added new categories of protected class where it would be useful to get an attorney to say, “Hey, here’s 20 minutes on this issue that you need to know.”

Now, the other thing I said in the book is don’t forget, it’s like a taxi meter, right? As soon as you get in, the clock starts, somebody’s paying that bill. It’s either coming outta your budget or somehow, but the attorneys, especially if you have to be one stop shop for HR, they can be a good resource for you ’cause they just fill in the gaps.

Steve Thomas: Well, it’s easier to conceptualize when you’re reading the book ’cause you can see the visual, but on an audio medium like the podcast, can you describe what the Library HR Triangle is?

Steve Albrecht: It’s kind of a sense that I wanted to get about how things are centered around three areas in the triangle, and I use the metaphor of the compass. The compass being the top part of the triangle. The first, top intersection point, which is Direction. And then the second one is the Culture. The work culture in a small library is different than a work culture in a larger library, and geographically, as you well know, the culture is significantly different, six blocks away from library to library. And then the other part is Compliance. All the stuff that has to do with the legal issues, ADA, age discrimination and protected classes. And then in the center of that is the sense of the commitment to the organization.

So HR is always, in its purest form, a support for the success of the enterprise, just like IT is a support for the success of the enterprise. So we may not see the patron, we not be at the desk that helps the transaction, but we put the people in place that can do those things. I use the idea of the triangle just to say, get it together in terms of the direction, get it together in terms of the compliance, get it together in terms of understanding the culture and focus on being a support tool for the library, large or small, so that they are compliant, and if you look at the stuff where things get expensive, lawsuits and litigation and all that stuff.

I say to people all the time in lots of industries, if you want to have more goodies, if you want to hire more people, you want better things in your facility, minimize the cost, and the cost of litigation is a huge one. So you say, well, we would’ve opened a new branch, but we had a $1 million lawsuit and there’s where that money went.

So things that we do well in the HR function touch a lot of areas. One is retention, right? We keep good people and they wanna work in the library business, and that’s somebody that we can grow into this career as opposed to us channeling through people one right after another ’cause it’s not a good fit. So all those things are really connected to the culture of the library and that’s where I think HR plays such a big part.

Steve Thomas: And and HR is not really something that, as far as I know, most library schools cover, and in the library world, having your MLIS is usually what is considered, “Oh, now you can be a supervisor!” However, we don’t get supervisor training in library schools. That’s always a conflict there that you’re learning on the job. What kind of mind shift change do you think you need to make to make sure that you’re being effective and compliant as far as HR goes?

Steve Albrecht: There’s two issues that I look at when it comes to brand new supervisors or even longtime supervisors, which is coaching. Do you help your employees every single day? And I say it all the time, good bosses coach in small and large ways every single day. And I call it corridor coaching, catching ’em in the hallway. Let’s walk and talk as we go from meeting to meeting or room to room where I just say, “Hey, I heard about this patron thing,” or, “How’s that thing going on that project?” Or, “Can you tell me about what the status is of this meeting or proposal that you’re gonna do in front of the city council?” Where you have those fine tuning, small adjustment conversations, which is not you sitting in your big chair and the employee sitting in the little chair in your office with the door closed, having a heavy duty conversation. It’s sometimes just a fine tuning, a catch up conversation. Good bosses, and you’ve worked for some, that do that for you all the time. It doesn’t feel like coaching, but it is.

The second part of that is where I have a lot of issues that I see, especially younger supervisors, really chafe is performance evaluation. ” Oh my God, do I have to write this thing, check all the boxes and write some narrative, and do I have to give this person a score?” And frankly, you may have seen this in your career, the forms are horrible oftentimes. There’ll be some odd 10 point scale or be super great, awesome, wonderful and horrible, and it’s like, “I don’t want to do this, and so I don’t give it the attention it needs, I feel uncomfortable talking to an employee that’s below standard, not performing well. That’s a hard conversation to have here. Sign this form that says, I don’t like you, or I don’t like your work.” When what the performance evaluation should be is a living document that says, “Hey, let’s use this for the rest of the year to coach off of, let’s use this for the rest of the time span to make small improvements in what you do.”

So I tried to write a whole chapter just on the performance evaluation part to go, first off, in a perfect world, we’d have better forms. We wouldn’t have these weird eight point scales and seven point scales and things like that. And also we would use the performance evaluation process as kind of accumulation of all the coaching conversations, meaning we have to keep files. So I talked to you in February, I talked to you in June, I talked to you in September. I look at all those meetings and that becomes the conglomeration of what your performance evaluations should look like. Unfortunately, what happens with, especially newer supervisors, frontline supervisors, people that have to do the evals is they don’t give it the attention they want, they rush through it. They try to race through the meeting. You may have had bosses that say, ” Hey Steve, here’s your eval. Just sign it and put it in my inbox,” and they don’t have a discussion with you about it. Like, okay, I’m doing so well that you don’t need to talk to me about this – yeah, it’s fine – which shows that they don’t want to be involved in that process.

And if you look at HR, they need that stuff. If they’re gonna discipline somebody, they’re gonna promote somebody, they’re gonna terminate somebody, those things are super important because they prove the historical process that we have used that’s been fair and reasonable and legal. And so those are two areas in the book that I really tried to focus on the coaching piece and the performance evaluation piece. Just to take a load off the employees that are like, “I don’t wanna do this. This is the hard part about being a boss. I don’t like to having these conversations.” I just wanna make it easier.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I always tell all my staff that when it comes to performance review time, you should never be surprised when you’re doing a performance review. Like you shouldn’t look at it and go, “Oh my gosh, I got a horrible score on this!” Yeah, you should have been talking to them about that already. Now, they may get a bad score on their performance evaluation, but it’s because, “You’re always late and I’ve been talking to you about it and you’re still being late, so you’re still having that issue,” but like, you should have already been having conversations with them.

Sometimes I’ll say, “You might be surprised at how nice I am to you and the nice things I say about you,” but it shouldn’t come out of the blue for that.

Steve Albrecht: That’s absolutely right, and in that context, you say, if I look at a perfect world for evaluations, and this came outta my experience when I worked for the city of San Diego, was we did ’em once a year and when I was there in San Diego, it was around the anniversary date of hire. Well, I had like 15 people working for me, so I was always doing them all through the year and was a hassle. And then they said, “Okay, we’re gonna switch over to once a year. We’ll do ’em at at Christmas time. In December.” And then we all howled, “Oh, I have too much work to do. I can’t do 15 of these in one month!” And then they said, “Okay, we’re gonna do these quarterly, we’re gonna do ’em four times a year. Three of ’em plus accumulation of the last quarter would be the fourth one.” Everyone’s like, “Oh my God, there’s too much work!” And in actuality, that was the wiser way to do it. That was a more clever way to do it because you said, “I only have to look at the employee for three or four months. I’m only evaluating the employee’s performance or behavior” – and those are both two different animals, work performance and work behavior. Attendance is a work behavior issue. Deadlines is a performance issue – “I only have to look at ’em for three months, then another three months, we’ll have the second conversation, another three months we’ll have the third conversation.”

As you’ve said, there should be no surprises when I write the final performance evaluation, which I’m gonna turn in at the end of the year, there’s no surprises ’cause we’ve already had these conversations. That was a big eye-opener for me because, I’d come from that sort of that traditional once a year, here’s your piece of paper, sign it, and how fast can we get outta this and then go back to doing something else. Whereas in San Diego, what we tried to say was, “I have a little thought about this to make it easier on yourself.” And so you say, “I’ve already talked to this employee about positive and negatives throughout the rating period and when I’d write the final one, it’s a lot easier.”

Steve Thomas: Libraries can’t always, unfortunately, pay the highest salaries that we’d love to pay if we could, but how can libraries still compete for great talent without over-promising things, but being realistic about what we can do and what services we offer?

Steve Albrecht: Your challenge is the same one from everybody that says, “We want the best people, but we can’t always pay them what they deserve and also how do we retain people that are like, is this it? This is the whole job?” Yes, this is the job. So I think realistic job descriptions and job duties is important so people know. I think people get into the profession because they like books and literature and being around learning and being perceived as an information professional. I think that that part’s important.

I think also you say, sometimes, ” We can’t pay you well, but we run a really good shop here. We take care of people here. We enjoy the work, we protect the culture, and we don’t allow harassment and we don’t allow patrons to pester people and bad behavior and things like that. We run the type of library where you feel safe working here. It’s a comfortable environment.” And that’s a big part because you could say to somebody, ” I’ll pay you a $100,000 a year for a job that makes you miserable, or I’ll pay you 50 grand a year for a job that you actually enjoy doing.” Most people would say, “I’d take the a hundred thousand!” I’m like, no, you wouldn’t. You’d be miserable after four days and you’d say, I don’t wanna do this anymore.

And I think there’s a reality check that when we’re hiring for that position, sometimes I look at enthusiasm over experience, and that’s not being flippant to people that are experienced in the library world, but sometimes you go, ” I love working with people. This seems like a fun job!” as opposed to, “Yeah, I can do this and when do I start?” So enthusiasm for me, especially in younger people, if we can nurture that and get them into this profession and they kind of dig what they’re doing as opposed to, “Eh, another day, another book,” where you don’t have that same sense of enthusiasm, it’s tough to train motivation. It’s hard to train morale. It’s hard to train enthusiasm.

Years ago there was a guy named Ken Blanchard. He wrote the book, the One Minute Manager, and he had a partner named Paul Hersey, and Hersey and Blanchard talked about this leadership model, and in two of the elements of the leadership model, one was willingness, the employee’s willingness to do things and the other was ability. So you had a four square model: you had low ability, low willingness, too dumb to come in outta the rain and doesn’t care. And at the other end, we have high ability, high willingness. Those are the people I call our shining stars. You put them in charge while you’re on vacation. You give them a project which they run all the way successfully. So high ability, they know how to do the work; high willingness, they want to.

Well, the biggest challenge is high ability, low willingness. So they’re a little burnt out. They’ve been doing library work or customer service work for a long time. ” 18 more years to go before I retire,” that kind of a thing. So high ability can do the job, low willingness doesn’t want to, is really the biggest challenge, but if you look at the other end of that and say low ability, but high willingness, motivated, excited, good, positive personality. You can train those people, and they catch right up.

So I refer to the high ability, low willingness as the smart slacker, which is they know how to do the job, but they don’t want to. They know how to do the job, but they look for shortcuts. Those are the folks that show up at Zoom meetings and just put up their avatar and never contribute and talk about what a waste of time it is all the time. The problem with those folks is they create other smart slackers so they can infect the culture by going, “What are you working so hard for? What are you busting your chops here for this thing? We get paid the same whether you work hard or not.” Those kind of people can infect the culture. So if I go to low ability, but high willingness, I can train that person, I can get ’em up to speed pretty quick.

Steve Thomas: And that infecting can happen just passively of like, “Well, look at Joe. He just sits over there and reads all the time, but they don’t ever say anything to him, so I guess I can just read all the time too!”

Steve Albrecht: My best friend is Major Garrett. He’s the Chief Washington Correspondent for CBS News. I’ve been best friends since I was six years old. When he started in DC, he came out of Missouri Journalism School and he’d worked in newspapers in Houston and Vegas and other places. He went to US News and World Report. Back in those days that was a pretty good magazine and in the ’90s, competed with Newsweek and Time and everything. He said there are people that worked there that had been there 10 years and not wrote one article. I’m like, how is that possible? He goes, I have to run like five a week. And there are guys that have worked here that have not written one article in 10 years. And so the bosses come by and go, “What are you working on?” ” I’m working on this thing over here.” And another year goes by, they don’t write one, it’s a magazine for God’s sakes, they don’t write one article.

How can you work in a job where you dodge the work all the time? ” How can I get out of not doing the stuff that other people do?” And so that creates a big resentment. I think, if you look at the coaching part, those kind of employees are stuck, and sometimes that’s a fixable issue, sometimes it’s not. But I find it sad sometimes that people are just mailing it in, and it would be faster just to do it instead of giving you seven reasons why they don’t want to.

Steve Thomas: We’ve talked about the interview process, but once you’ve hired somebody, you found that great person, what are the parts of the onboarding process that you think are important to lay the groundwork for long-term success?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I think there’s a couple mistakes. One is the fire hose, which is let’s give you two days worth of information in about 20 minutes. Here’s our employee benefit stuff, and you need to sign this and sign that, and here’s our policy about this and that, and then, okay, go do your job. By the way, the break room’s over there and the restroom’s over there, and here’s your ID badge and I’ll see you later. So, a little bit more thoughtfulness about how we bring people in and we don’t overexpose them to so much information that they’re going, “I can’t possibly do this job. There’s just too much here to learn.”

I look at stuff like in your world, like, how do we bring them up to speed on the software? How do we bring ’em up to speed on the technical parts of this job, which can be overwhelming sometimes when you think of, I have to help patrons and do this other stuff here, which involves scanners and RFID and all kinds of other stuff.

And then the other part is do we introduce ourselves to new employees, whether it’s in a group onboarding thing or one-on-one so they know who’s who. “I’m the library director and this is the assistant director, and this is the person that’s in charge of this area and this is part of this collection.” and so there’s a face and a name so that they don’t walk around and go, “Is that guy my boss?” And they don’t know that stuff because we’ve not done a good job there.

And then I like the idea of exposing the new employees to shadow mentors, which is, here’s somebody who’s enthusiastic, who’s been here a while, who has a little bit of a training bent to them. They like training, they like helping people, and we connect them to them and go, “Hey, give this person the ropes. Give them this person a walkthrough of how this stuff works.” I mean, I’ve worked in retail environments. They’re like, “Well, there’s where you’re gonna be. You’ll figure it out as you go along.” Oh, okay. And so oftentimes, especially with younger employees, you go, I don’t have a lot of experience in my life to fall back on as to what to do. I don’t have a lot of work experience around people and customers and bosses to know how things are and it this idea of the shadow mentor or this peer person who’s been around a while and knows how to explain stuff in a friendly, reasonable way, can go a long way to removing a lot of that anxiety that younger employees have.

If you’ve come from another library world and you just go, “Okay, I recognize this culture,” but if you don’t, it’s a different culture. It’s not like working at a bank or a real estate office is a completely different culture. And then, from your experience, you say, if I’ve worked in retail, the patron is a different customer in the world than somebody walking in that wants to buy a pair of shoes. They have completely different needs. They may be experiencing all kinds of stressors that the guy buying shoes is not experiencing, and I have to be able to recognize those things and how do I help this person?

Yeah, and you know that a lot of people come into the library and don’t know what they don’t know. Like, “Oh, you guys can do that?” Yes we can. And so there’s that fact finding that good library folks do to figure out the best way to help people. That’s a skill that we have to build into brand new employees ’cause they ask a lot of. “Yes / No” questions. ” Are you finding everything okay?” Yeah. Okay. ” Do you need any help?” Then it doesn’t get to the presenting issue, which is, “Hey, what brings you in today?” ” What are you looking to do?” Or, ” Are you having some issues online that I can help you with?” that gets us to that second level of help.

Steve Thomas: Yep. When I’m working the public service points, my go-to is, “How can I help you today?”

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. And you say, can that be taught? Yes. But it also comes from experience where somebody who works with the brand new employee says, “Hey, here’s how we do things in this environment, which is unique.”

Steve Thomas: That’s the important part, I think, to have a model for, because all of the learning the policies and the procedures, yeah. They’ll learn all that. Just don’t, like you said, the fire hose up front, you don’t have to throw all of that at them all on the first day. Like, they’ll learn all that. If they don’t know the answer, tell them it’s perfectly fine to ask a question of another staff member or a supervisor. Don’t feel like you have to know everything at once, but knowing how to approach people is really important early on. And that’s like, if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine, but as long as you’re approaching them respectfully and really trying to help them, that’s what we want.

Steve Albrecht: I think there’s a crossroads that every person does in jobs where you go, “Is this the place for me? I’ll know better after a week and I’ll know better after a month, but maybe I don’t make it a month because it just seems like this is not the place for me. I don’t like the culture. It’s not a fit. I don’t feel respected, supported, appreciated.”

I talk to bosses all the time about praise. Can you dial up the praise a little bit? Say, “Hey, great job. Appreciate your effort on that thing really helped us out.” Not just, “Hey, thanks” for whatever he did, and then walk off. It’s a time issue and then I hear supervisors say stuff like, “Oh, they know it. They know that I know that they’re doing a good job. What do I have to tell ’em for?” I think when you’re new, hearing, “Hey, good job on that thing, you helped us out there. Appreciate it. Thanks for taking care of that.” goes a long way towards building that culture where people say, “Hey, they appreciate what I do.”

There are still bosses, hopefully more rare, which is, “Well, their paycheck is what should be praising them. They get paid to be here,” and that kind of crap. Where you say, “I will go outta my way to catch people doing good things because human beings want to be appreciated for what they do.” And for some supervisors, because they’re quote, busy, that becomes an afterthought, which makes me crazy.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That leads to a toxic workplace there. So on the opposite thing, when people are leaving, we often do exit interviews, but what is it that libraries should be learning from doing those exit interviews? If it’s just a checkbox because that’s what we’re supposed to do, that’s not helpful. So what can we learn long term from those exit interviews?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, it’s a great question. SHRM, Society for Human Resource Management, had a piece a couple months ago where they talked about the stay interview. The stay interview is the precursor to the exit interview, which is, “Wow, this person seems to be on their tiptoes looking around for where they want to go, which is not here. Their exit visas may be getting stamped and they’re leaving the building!” And so the stay interview is, let’s catch them before they get to that stage where we have to do the exit interview.

I always ask the same six questions: What do you like about your job? What do you don’t like about your job? Third question, what do your coworkers, the people that you work with, what do they do that makes your job more fun, easier better for you? Obvious next fourth question, what do your coworkers do that makes your job harder and you wish they wouldn’t do? And then the challenge, and this is probably best asked by an HR person, is what does your boss do that you like that helped you do your job? And then obviously the sixth question is, what does your boss do that makes your job more challenging? If employees are honest with us during those six questions, as a consultant, when I come in, I don’t know the culture at all, but if I ask those six questions of about five different employees, I have the culture pinned down pretty accurately. I have positive, supportive, useful culture as opposed to, like you said, toxic or not a healthy one, because those six questions can tell me a lot in a really short period of time.

So the exit interview, let’s take worst case scenario. “I’m quitting because I’m being sexually harassed by a patron.” “What? How long has this been going on?” “About six months.” ” Why didn’t you talk to me about it?” “I didn’t think you’d do anything. I didn’t know who to talk to. I’m not familiar with what multiple channels of reporting means and I told one of my coworkers and they told me not to say anything ’cause you’ll get fired” or stupid stuff like that.

I’m always shocked when people tell me stories about why people leave, and they only discover it in the exit interview. You say, “If you had come to me as soon as this happened, I would’ve put consequences on this patron. We would’ve done a lot of things to support you and make sure this doesn’t happen again, and maybe you’d still be here.” But this idea, like we talked about, being shocked about the performance evaluation, if we’re shocked by stuff we hear at the exit interview, either the employee didn’t have confidence in us or our policies, or our relationship or rapport or they got bad information from somebody else, some amateur lawyer that works with them, or some family members said, “Don’t tell HR about this. It’ll become your fault.” And we could have fixed those issues. So I feel pain about those kinds of conversations ’cause someone was telling me about something which is a policy violation, which has been going on forever, which could have addressed. But the exit interview, at that point you’re like, “Well, now what do I do?” And the answer is I can still address it. I’ll still go back to the patron and then force consequences even though this person doesn’t work here, we have a duty of care to the person that told us that information but you’re like, “Great, lost opportunity.”

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s the trouble is that you lose these great people sometimes. And some of that is just in the whole process of, the next thing I was gonna ask you about was creating a atmosphere of civility. You want to make your staff comfortable in the workplace to come to you with things like that. I mean, there’s also building trust and things like that. Sometimes it’s the employee’s fault, sometimes it’s our fault. Sometimes it’s the other colleagues’ faults. It’s a hard thing, but we can do what we can do on our end of it to try to make it better. But what is the reason behind you wanting to really focus on encouraging civility in the workplace?

Steve Albrecht: Based on the politics and things around DEI, the concept itself is still valid. However, it’s been tarred by this brush of “wokeness” and whatnot. So I mean, I’ve taught DEI for years, and I always talk about a concept within DEI, which I think is really important, which is social intelligence. My dad wrote a book about it. Social intelligence is sort of an offshoot of Daniel Goldman’s stuff about emotional intelligence, which is, if I was to boil the concept down to a phrase, I would say read the room and say or do the right thing based on who’s in the room. Your best friend’s in the room. Nobody else. You can tell the greatest dirty joke in the world, as long as it doesn’t leave the building, doesn’t leave the room. The mayor is standing there at some function and you’re in there with city council members and the news media, you would keep those thoughts to yourself.

The problem is sometimes employees believe, ” Well, it’s a free country. I can say whatever I want. Or I was just kidding, or I didn’t really mean it. Or, we’re too politically correct,” or whatever excuse they use. It’s not good social intelligence. So I look at civility as kind of a pretty broad brush, which is we don’t allow bullying here. We don’t allow bosses to bully employees. And bullying’s kind of a weird HR concept because it’s not well defined. I mean, I look at the schools, and you got kids in school and you go, we have anti-bullying policies and there’s consequences, and it’s in the ed code and teachers are trained in it and counselors and principals and whatnot. It’s not always perfect, but it’s better than in the workplace, which is we don’t have a definition or a policy of what bullying is in the United States. It’s not illegal. Sexual and racial harassment’s illegal. Protected class harassment, illegal. Bullying, not illegal.

So we use civility to say how we treat people, bosses to employees, boss to boss, employee to employee. How we are treated by patrons, we don’t allow certain behaviors. We set boundaries. The social intelligence, read the room, say or do the right thing, says don’t embarrass other people, don’t insult other people intentionally or accidentally, because you’ve read the room and thought, “I should probably not say something,” or “I can go ahead and say something.” Somebody doesn’t wanna be hugged. Don’t be hugging people. That’s a boundary of social intelligence, which is “I need to pay attention to my impact on other employees as I do my job.”

And when people say, “Well, they should learn to adjust to me,” I’m like, “That’s not how the world works. You adjust to the culture you’re in and say or do the right thing there.” So that’s why I like the idea of social intelligence as the civility piece. I’ve said this in coaching, you don’t have to love or like everybody you work with, but you gotta coexist. First off, patron doesn’t care whether we like or love each other. They don’t care. They just want what they want from our services. But in the ideal, we say, “This person’s not my cup of tea, but I can treat ’em with respect. This person does not share my political or religious or whatever beliefs, but I can get along in the environment that we’re in here today.”

And so that’s where social intelligence says despite differences, we can get along in the environment that we’re in, because that’s what’s expected of us in the people we serve. It creates less conflict. It’s just a better way to go. So that’s the shift, I think, that makes better sense in the post-DEI world, which is civility is something that’s, I think, easier to explain.

Steve Thomas: Right? Like you said, you’re not really teaching anything different. You’re just not using, I dunno the right word, weaponized phrases. We’re still teaching that everybody should get along and be included and feel welcome and things like that.

Steve Albrecht: And if that’s not happening to you as an employee, you have multiple ways to let us know. You talk to the director. You talk to the HR function, you talk to your supervisor. The most heartbreaking thing I see with employees issues like that is, “I didn’t know who to tell or I didn’t trust that if I told somebody it would be handled.” That’s just heartbreaking to me. I mean, if that was happening to my daughter, she works for a TV station in Florida, if that stuff was happening to her, I’d be super angry that she wasn’t supported the way that every other employee should be supported.

So that kind of goes back to the exit interview thing, “Man, we missed an opportunity here.” Some of it maybe employee maturity issues. Sometimes we get immature people, a little eccentric and they don’t know how to have social intelligence, but the larger piece of that is we create the kind of environment where people don’t do things to each other which are policy violations, and they have the courage to come forward and tell us, and it is courage with a capital C, nobody wants to be a tattletale or be perceived as a whistleblower, I get it. But when we create the environment where first, that stuff doesn’t happen, and the second is we take actions when it does, the best we can say is, we had our finger on the pulse of the culture all the time.

Steve Thomas: I think you touched on an important thing there that sometimes when you have young employees, especially if they’ve never worked anywhere or maybe only worked at McDonald’s or something, maybe they have never had to deal with these things. They don’t understand it, so if you can coach them back into learning what a proper work environment is, that might be what your role in their life is, is to teach them “This is how you act at work. Here, we are professional, and I know a lot of people don’t like defining professionalism or whatever, but I think again, civility is a good baseline for what should happen in a workplace and I do find it interesting that your dad wrote the book on that. Did you all talk about that? How did that work between the two of you?

Steve Albrecht: My dad’s a futurist and so he wrote a huge book back in ’85 called Service America, which was the first big book on customer service, sold almost a million copies, so he’s always been a strategy guy and always been an executive coach and a lot of stuff around the strategic part of the organization, but he looked at Goldman’s success with Emotional Intelligence and he said, is there another factor? Is social intelligence not just being nice to people? It’s not just being polite, but it is a mindset that says, “I have impact on other people and I’m gonna read the room, and as a result of that, I’m gonna adjust my behavior around people I don’t know versus people I know very well, people are really good friends of mine, people I hardly know at all. My behavior’s gonna be different for everyone.” So it’s not a one size fits all approach.

My dad, he has the same disease I have, which is we’re interested in a hundred things, but I helped write a chunk of the social intelligence book and I just found that idea of awareness and self-assessment really interesting about, especially as bosses to say, ” I have impact on the people that work for me” and one of the exercises I’ve always done in training classes is, especially for brand new supervisors, is let’s make a list of the best boss you ever worked for, their traits and characteristics and behavior. And then let’s make a list of the worst bosses you ever worked for, traits, behaviors, and characteristics, and eccentricities. So I’ll get, for the bad list, alcoholic, sexually harassed me, stole my ideas, physically assaulted me, screamed at me in front of other people. And then for the best bosses I get, praise and gave me ownership in my career and helped me promote and all the really cool stuff.

So I always ask the supervisors, which list do you want to end up on? Because you know as well as me, if you look at people who work for you, they think about you compared to any other boss they’ve ever had, positive or negatively, and they only do it every single day. What kind of boss is Steve Thomas? What kind of boss have I worked for that I compare him to?

So which list do you wanna end up on? I don’t have to give out candy every single day. But I do have to enforce policy and make hard decisions, but I will do it in a way that keeps me on that best boss list. Praise and support and communication and frequent discussions about stuff and fine tuning and coaching and all the stuff that good bosses do when you go back and look at the ones that have mentored you or impacted your life.

That’s the model that I want in the HR book was, how do we run an HR shop, whether we’re the library director or HR professionals, or you’re new to the HR profession, so that we’re perceived as a good place to work, a supportive place to work, a place that that pays attention to the the health of this culture?

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I would love to be on people’s Greatest Boss list, but as long as I’m not on their Worst Boss list, I think I’ll be okay.

Steve Albrecht: And just look at your own characteristics and say, if you’re a parent, as I know you are, like I was, I’m thinking, “Well I’m not gonna do this stuff my parents did that wasn’t so good.” I’ve had that conversation with my wife many times, ” What did our parents do that we didn’t do with our kids? ’cause it was probably a better thing to do because it was not too great for us, turned out okay for them ’cause we didn’t do those things.” So as a boss you say, “What are the things I wanna avoid that happened to me, how I was victimized by a boss that was horrible. I don’t wanna do those things, end up on that list.”

Steve Thomas: Yep. So one of the other big issues you have to deal with, HR-related, is discipline and termination. How can library supervisors start approaching those issues? I know some of it we can use what we’ve talked about before when you’re preparing the performance review that you’re keeping notes and things like that, but what else can they do to prepare themselves?

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, so I think I go back to three different acronyms. I’m a big fan of performance improvement plans, PIPs, and a bigger fan of behavior improvement plans. So performance improvement plan is you’re not getting your work in on time, the quality’s not great, it’s full of errors, but the behavior improvement plan is stop gossiping, stop being sarcastic in meetings, stop being rude to patrons, stop being rude over the phone, don’t be idea-killing all the time when people bring up ideas in staff meetings. I think supervisors are more comfortable with the PIP, the performance improvement part, than they are with the BIP, the behavioral improvement part.

If the behavioral improvement doesn’t work, then we go to what I call the PAM, which is the last coaching meeting before we switch over to discipline, the Personal Accountability Meeting. I’m going to talk with you about all the stuff we talked about in coaching, which has not worked. This is the last coaching meeting I have, and this is important for your listeners that have union environment. It switches over to a Weingarten meeting the minute that you say, the next conversation we have is gonna be discipline-related, and so we foreshadow the fact that this is the last coaching conversation we’re gonna have. I’m not gonna beg you or plead you or scream or yell or remind you of the things we’ve talked about, getting to work on time or whatever it happens to be, for the last three months or whatever it is. The PAM is the crossroads conversation, Personal Accountability Meeting. What’s the key phrase there? Accountability. You employee, take ownership of the stuff we’ve talked about. If not, great, next step, very next meeting, gonna be disciplined. This could be demotion, suspension, written warning, whatever happens to be. The behaviors are egregious, we move to suspension, decision, termination.

But I think sometimes some supervisors drag out the discipline process. Let’s have another meeting, and then another meeting, and then another meeting. And what the employee says is, “Nah, not that bad. They wouldn’t possibly fire me.” That’s why we use the PAM. This is the last conversation we’re going to have. The next discussion we’ll have will be discipline-related. Now, you can get a rep or you can tell your cousin’s uncle’s brother who’s an attorney and all that, you can do what you want, but I’m giving you notice that the next time we talk about this will be discipline-related. Now, you can stop that process by complying. You can stop that process by continuing to do the stuff that we’ve asked to do and actually putting it into place and sustaining it. It’s up to you.

Steve Thomas: You do bring up another point too that I didn’t bring up throughout all of this. Obviously if you’re in a union shop, there’s some other things you need to do to comply with that, and HR can help you with that as well of bridging that gap sometimes between management and the union.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I mean the MOUs are super important, the memo of understanding is super important. I’ll give you an example. I used to work for Boeing, a tiny little airplane manufacturer. They have a training rule, which is the training can’t last longer than 30 minutes. If it’s soft skills per union rules, it can only last 30 minutes. So if you’re not teaching somebody how to rivet a plane, it’s soft skills. It can only last 30 minutes. I’m like, okay, so we know what we know.

What I try to say is, look, we’re trying to create a partnership with the union that says we’re gonna be transparent. And you will know the PAM means the PAM, and the next step from that is discipline. If you’re gonna have a rep for that, that’s great, but we gave notice.

If I can make one point, Steve, which I forgot to talk about, which I think is super important and I really want folks to think about this. I wish we would get away from this AI scanning of resumes. This idea that somebody wants to work in the library world and we create barriers with filters and software to screen out not finding the perfect keywords, it just breaks my heart.

We don’t have that many applicants. Sit down and look at the resumes and the applications and get a feel for what this person’s all about. Think about how difficult it is to create the right algorithm to get you pulled from the pile and put you at number one if you don’t have the keywords in your resume. Some people don’t know how to do that stuff. I don’t know how to do that stuff. So I find this electronic filtering process to be prohibitive of getting good people in the building. And the idea that I didn’t think up the right algorithm means I’m not gonna get an opportunity to interview for this job. I find that an easy fix. Let’s look at the paper copy and make some decisions based on what we see.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, no, and and I think that’s a good thing to wrap up on because I think that transitions well into the webinar series that you do, Library 2.0 with Steve Hargadon, because there are a number of those on AI and libraries and so if you’re interested in that topic and seeing, it’s not, “AI is the worst thing ever, and it’s gonna destroy us all” and it’s also not, “Yay, yay. AI is the solution to all of our problems.” It’s “Okay, it’s here, let’s figure out what we’re gonna do about it. It’s really practical advice.”

Steve Albrecht: Yeah. Thanks, and Hargadon is the guru of AI for libraries. He was an early adopter of that stuff, and so he’s bringing me along slowly and kicking and screaming into the AI world.

Steve Thomas: So before we wrap up, you mentioned earlier that you have another book coming out soon. What is that next book gonna be on?

Steve Albrecht: So, for Rowman & Littlefield, it’s now owned by Bloomsbury, I did the Library Leader’s Guide to Human Resources, which is our conversation here, and the next one is the Library Leader’s Guide to Employee Coaching. So I took the one chapter of the previous book on coaching and said, let’s turn it into whole book. I feel strongly about the subject. So I covered everything under the sun about how you coach people in different ways for different topics, strategic level, developmental, helping ’em promote, mentorship, corrective, even special coaching, which is people having off-the-job issues. We make referrals to employee assistance programs and things like that. How to have hard conversations, some scripts to follow. How to give people bad news in coaching conversations early on, which just the way is inevitable. So I put everything I could think about into the coaching book. That’ll be out next year.

Steve Thomas: Well, maybe listeners will hear from you again when that comes out.

Steve Albrecht: I appreciate that. It’s always good to be with you, Steve. You ask good questions. It’s fun to talk to you.

Steve Thomas: And as we said, the Library 2.0 series is something that you regularly appear on, and those are webinars on a variety of topics in the library world.

Steve Albrecht: Yeah, I’ve done over a hundred of ’em. So we have a library of about a hundred. Some of ’em are paid, some of ’em are free. I’ve been doing that with Steve Hargadon, two a month for a really long time. And it’s just fun to do those.

Steve Thomas: Well the book again is The Library Leader’s Guide to Human Resources, Keeping It Real, Legal and Ethical, and it’s available right now. So go grab it. Thanks for coming on the show, Steve.

Steve Albrecht: Thanks Steve. Appreciate it.